Absence of the Hero

by Charles Bukowski

  Bozo ran out into the world with the finger in his mouth. . . .

  Harry sat on the floor, pressing his hand against his stomach.

  “GET A TOWEL! GET A TOWEL! GET SOME HYDROGEN PEROXIDE!”

  He inhaled heavily, exhaled.

  “CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE!”

  Then, curiously, the pain almost stopped. It just felt as if something were still taking small bites from the finger stub. There was an odd coldness too, as if the finger were in freezing weather, yet it throbbed.

  Ann came running in from the bathroom with the materials, which included a small first-aid kit and the instruction booklet.

  “OH, MY GOD, HARRY, IT’S ALL MY FAULT, ALL MY FAULT! I LOVE YOU, HARRY, I LOVE YOU! OH, THAT STUPID MONKEY! WHAT HAVE I DONE?”

  “It’s O.K., baby, don’t blame yourself, it’s just rotten luck. Here, give me some peroxide!”

  Harry pulled the hand away from his shirt, looked at it a moment . . . so odd to see that missing part . . . and he doused the finger-stump with the peroxide.

  “Give me some cotton, baby, and some bandage-wrap. . . .”

  Harry felt fairly calm about it all and his mind asked him, why are you so calm about all this?

  And then his mind answered, I don’t know.

  “Adhesive, please. . . .”

  Harry bound the clumsy affair. . . .

  “Scissors, please. . . .”

  “OH, HARRY. . . .”

  “Phone for the ambulance, Ann . . . I have to go to Emergency. . . .”

  Ann moved toward the bedroom to get at the telephone. Harry ran past her toward the front door. . . .

  “HARRY, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”

  “I’VE GOT TO GET THAT MONKEY, THAT MONKEY HAS MY FINGER!”

  “HARRY, WHAT DO YOU MEAN?”

  He paused at the doorway.

  “THEY SAY THAT IF YOU CAN GET A PART BACK SOON ENOUGH THEY CAN SEW IT BACK ON!”

  Harry ran out into the yard.

  “Bozo, baby, where are you, Bozo? I’m not mad, Bozo! Bozo, baby, come on, come on, plenty of bananas and you can ride the doggy, you can crap all over everywhere, I won’t care. . . . Bozo, here Bozo!”

  Harry ran about the yard searching . . . the blood was beginning to seep through his makeshift bandage. It was like a white mitten which was gradually turning red. The hand had stopped throbbing. The throbbing had gone up to his temples. . . .

  Shit, he thought, maybe the son of a bitch has rabies. . . .

  “Bozo, come on, Bozo, we all love you!”

  The yard appeared to be vacant of the animal.

  Harry hurried up the driveway, stood out front a moment, took a gamble and turned right, walked toward the Johnson house. Mrs. Johnson, a grey lady with a fat white face, thick legs, and eyes like faded pearl buttons, Mrs. Johnson just stood there watering her lawn. The water from the hose just arched out and splattered against the same area of grass. Mrs. Johnson was consumed with the sound and the action of the water.

  “MRS. JOHNSON!”

  “Oh, good morning, Mr. Evans. . . . Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “Mrs. Johnson, have you seen a monkey?”

  “What?”

  “Have you seen a monkey?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve seen them.”

  “I mean, right now! Around here! NOW!”

  “Why?”

  “Why? MRS. JOHNSON, THAT GODDAMNED MONKEY HAS MY FINGER!”

  “Please don’t use vulgarity around me, Mr. Evans!”

  “OH, MY GOD!”

  Harry ran past her and down her driveway.

  “Where are you going?”

  She dropped her hose and ran after him.

  “YOU GET OUT OF MY YARD!”

  Harry ran about her yard, searching, searching. . . .

  There was nothing.

  He turned and ran back up the driveway past Mrs. Johnson.

  “I’M GOING TO TELL MY HUSBAND HOW RUDE YOU WERE TO ME! HE’LL KICK YOUR FRIGGING ASS!”

  My god, thought Harry, as he ran out of there, she didn’t even notice my bloody hand. . . . Oh, it’s useless, I’ll never find that beast. . . . He’s probably tossed my finger away by now . . . but I’ve got to keep looking . . . not much time left. . . .

  He saw Ann standing in front of their house.

  “HARRY, I CALLED THE AMBULANCE! THEY’RE ON THE WAY!”

  “THANKS, BABY, TELL THEM TO WAIT! I’LL BE RIGHT BACK!”

  “I LOVE YOU, HARRY. . . . I’M SO SORRY, OH MY GOD, I’M SO SORRY!”

  “IT’S O.K., BABY, I’LL BE RIGHT BACK!”

  Harry ran further left down the block. He ran down the drive of the Henderson house. The hired yardman, a thin and rather contented fellow, was using his leaf-blower to clear away various debris. As Harry ran up the yardman saw this thing running toward him, this thing with a bloody white arm-end. He screamed, lifted the blower and shot a blast of air at Harry.

  “Shit,” said Harry.

  He turned and ran back up the driveway and out into the street.

  He stood in the street center, looking about, thinking, I must be just about out of time on that finger.

  Then, to the left, about a half a block down he saw a crowd gathered about an icecream truck. There were mostly children and a few adults.

  And there on top of the icecream truck was some small type of creature.

  Harry ran down the street.

  When he got to the crowd, there was Bozo . . . just sitting on top of the ice cream truck.

  And, hanging from the edge of his mouth was the end of Harry’s index finger.

  Bozo just sat there, almost in a dream-state.

  “O.K.,” said Harry, “that’s my monkey. Now, just stand back. . . . Don’t frighten him, please. . . .”

  “I’ll give him my ice cream if he’ll come down,” said a little boy with just a touch of snot dripping from his left nostril.

  “Thank you, son, but please let me handle this. . . .”

  “Hey, mister, what’s that thing hanging out of his mouth?” asked a little girl.

  “Never mind what that is. . . . Whatever it is, I want that and I want him. . . . All right?”

  “Sure, mister. . . . How come your hand is all bloody?”

  “It’s nothing. . . . Now, everybody, please step back. . . . You are frightening him. . . .”

  The crowd was quite nice. Adults and children all, they stepped back. Not too far, but they did step back.

  Harry looked up at the top of the truck.

  “Bozo, it’s me. . . . Remember me? Come on down . . . and bring that . . . thing . . . you have in your mouth with you. If you do, we’ll be friends forever, I promise you! Bozo, are you listening?”

  “What’s that thing in his mouth, mister?” asked the same little girl.

  “GODDAMN IT, IT’S MY FINGER! NOW, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

  “What’s he doing with your finger, mister?”

  Harry looked at Bozo just sitting up there in the same dream-like trance.

  Harry turned to the driver of the ice cream truck.

  “Get me something, Something luscious! Something that . . . if you were a monkey . . . you’d come down and eat!”

  “Huh?”

  “All right, forget it . . . get me an ice cream bar!”

  “What flavor?”

  “Banana.”

  The driver worked his way toward the back of the truck.

  Harry looked back up at the monkey.

  “BOZO! YOU MUST BE HUNGRY! WE WANT YOU TO EAT! UNDERSTAND? WE’RE GOING TO GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO EAT, UNDERSTAND? EAT!”

  Bozo made a little sound.

  Harry smiled.

  Then Bozo took the finger out of his mouth, looked at it, put it back into his mouth, and started chewing.

  “OH SHIT! NOT THAT! STOP STOP STOP!”

  Bozo kept chewing. The driver came up to Harry and attempted to hand him the ice cream bar, saying, “We’re outta banana. . . .”

  Harry slapped the bar to th
e street. Harry tried to climb the side of the truck but the side was smooth, had no grips.

  Harry stopped.

  His bloody hand had left ugly and strange smears against the truck side.

  Harry put his head there, rested.

  “Oh shit . . . oh god. . . .”

  Then he pulled his head from the truck side. He looked back to the top of the truck.

  Bozo was giving it a last munch. . . .

  Then he rounded his mouth and spit. . . .

  A little bone flipped through the air and landed upon the asphalt. Harry looked at it, then turned away.

  He began walking back down the street toward his house.

  Then he heard a voice.

  “HEY, MISTER, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT YOUR MONKEY?”

  Henry turned.

  It was the little boy who had the snot emanating from his left nostril.

  “You can have him. . . .”

  “OH BOY! OH BOY, OH BOY, OH BOY!”

  Harry began to walk toward his house again.

  He could see the ambulance in the driveway. There were two or three figures . . . maybe four . . . waiting there. . . . Maybe more. Things were beginning to blur. One of the figures that he could distinguish was his wife.

  “HARRY, THE AMBULANCE IS WAITING! SHOULD WE COME DOWN THERE?”

  He waved his arm over his head, the one with the bloody hand. . . .

  “NO, NO! I’LL BE THERE SOON!”

  Strangely, he felt as if not much had happened.

  But he knew that something had happened.

  As he walked along he held his hand down to his side, that hand, and he didn’t look at it.

  Mrs. Johnson was still watering the same spot on her lawn as he walked by.

  “MY HUSBAND,” she screamed upon seeing him, “IS GOING TO KICK YOUR FRIGGING ASS!”

  There was nothing else to do but walk toward the ambulance.

  Playing and Being the Poet

  4/12/92 11:42 P.M.

  Where to begin? Well, it was Nietzsche who, when asked about the poets, responded, “The Poets? The Poets lie too much.”

  As one reads the poetry of the past and of our time, this criticism seems damned apt. There seems much posturing, prancing . . . playing at being the poet, this select messenger from the gods. I believe that if the gods selected most of our poets, then they did, indeed, select badly. Of course, there is much con and chicanery in all the Arts, but I believe the poets are the best at besmirching their particular field.

  And I will grant you here that it’s much easier to criticize poetry than to write it. When I was a very young man, I enjoyed reading the critical articles in the Sewanee and Kenyon Reviews, in regard to poetics. Those critics were such darlings, such snobs, so protected, so inbred, and they were amusingly vicious—at times—toward other critics. They neatly sliced each other to pieces in the finest of language, and I admired that, for my own language was rather coarse and direct, which I preferred, yet their way held much wonderment for me. Ah, such a gentlemanly way of calling each other assholes and idiots. Yet, beyond this, they had some insights on what was wrong with poetry and what could possibly be done about that. But, look here, when I turned to the actual poetry within the pages of those magazines, it was very bad poetry—pretentious, pale, inconclusive, muddied, boring. . . . It was an insult to the pages. The fight was gone, the gamble was gone. It was stale milk. It was the wretchedness of being all too careful. And when the critics themselves tried the poem, it had none of the bombast and fireworks of their critical pieces. It was as if moving to the poem form, they left what there was of their souls someplace else. Poetry is the final testing ground and very few practitioners in our time or in centuries past have passed the test.

  Poetry comes from where you’ve lived and how you’ve lived and from what makes you create it. Most people have already entered the death process by the age of 5, and with each passing year there is less of them in the sense of being original beings with a chance to break through and out and away from the obvious and the mutilating. Generally, those who do have had life experiences and continue to have life experiences that set them aside, isolate them in such a manner that they become beautiful freaks, visionaries with their own visions. Perhaps there is some luck involved here but not exactly, for daily we are given choices, and if you choose wrong too often, anti-life, then you will soon be dead long before burial.

  Those who are best at poetry are those who have to write it and will continue to write it no matter the result. For, if they don’t, something else will happen: murder, suicide, madness, god knows what. The act of writing the Word down is the act of miracle, the saving grace, the luck, the music, the going-on. It clears the space, it defines the crap, it saves your ass and some other people’s asses along with it. If fame somehow comes through all this, you must ignore it, you must continue to write as if the next line were your first line.

  Also, there are other writers, though very few of them. But for me, there were maybe 6 or 7 who kept me going when all else said stop.

  And although we must ignore praise, there are times when we might allow ourselves to feel good for just a bit. I received a letter from a prisoner in a jail in Australia who wrote me, “Your books are the only books that pass from cell to cell.”

  But, I’ve talked enough about writing poetry here; there is still time tonight to write some. A few beers, a cigar, classical music on the radio. See you later.

  —Charles Bukowski

  Sources

  “The Reason Behind Reason,” Matrix, vol. 9, no. 2, Summer 1946. “Love, Love, Love,” Matrix, vol. 9, nos. 3–4, Winter 1946–47. “Cacoethes Scribendi,” Matrix, vol. 10, nos. 3–4, Fall-Winter 1947. “The Rapist’s Story,” Harlequin, vol. 2, no. 1, 1957. “80 Airplanes Don’t Put You in the Clear,” Harlequin, vol. 2, no. 1, 1957. “Manifesto: A Call for Our Own Critics,” Nomad, no. 5/6, 1960. “Peace, Baby, Is Hard Sell,” Renaissance 4, 1962. “Examining My Peers,” Literary Times (Chicago), vol. 3, no. 4, May, 1964. “If I Could Only Be Asleep,” Open City Press, vol. 1, no. 6, January 6–13, 1965. “The Old Pro,” Ole, no. 5, 1966. “Allen Ginsberg/Louis Zukofsky,” Ole, no. 7, May 1967. “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” Open City, no. 32, December 8–14, 1967. “Bukowski on Bukowski,” Open City, no. 92, February 23–March 1, 1969. “The Absence of the Hero,” Klacto 23/International, Frankfurt, 1969. “Christ With Barbecue Sauce,” Candid Press, December 27, 1970. “The Cat in the Closet,” Nola Express no. 51, March 20–April 2, 1970. “More Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” December 6, 1970, Candid Press. “Ah, Liberation, Liberty, Lilies on the Moon!” unpublished ms, UCSB, 1971. “Sound and Passion,” Adam, vol. 15, no. 3, March 1971. “I Just Write Poetry So I Can Go to Bed With Girls,” Rogue, No. 29, April 1971. “The House of Horrors,” unpublished ms, 1971, University of Arizona Library. “Untitled essay on d.a. levy,” The Serif, Vol. VIII, no. 4, December 1971. “Henry Miller Lives in Pacific Palisades and I Live on Skid Row, Still Writing About Sex,” Knight, vol. 9, no. 7, 1972. “A Foreword to These Poems,” Anthology of L.A. Poets, eds. Charles Bukowski, Neeli Cherry & Paul Vangelisti, Laugh Literary/Red Hill Press, 1972. “The Outsider: Tribute to Jon Edgar Webb,” Wormwood Review, vol. 12, no. 1, issue 45, 1972. “Vern’s Wife,” Fling, vol. 15, no. 2, May 1972. “Notes of A Dirty Old Man,” Nola, No. 104, April 14–27, 1972. “He Beats His Women,” Second Coming: Special Charles Bukowski Issue, vol. 2, no. 3, 1973. “Notes of A Dirty Old Man,” L.A. Free Press, June 1, 1973. “Notes of A Dirty Old Man,” L.A. Free Press, June 28, 1974. “Notes of a Dirty Old Man,” L.A. Free Press, August 22, 1975. “Notes of a Dirty Old Man: Notes of a dirty old driver of a light blue 1967 Volkswagen TRV 491,” L.A. Free Press, Nov. 7, 1975. “The Big Dope Reading,” Hustler, March 1977. “East Hollywood: The New Paris,” Second Coming, Vol. 10, no. 1/2, 1981. “The Gambler,” High Times, November 1983. “The Ladies Man of East Hollywood,” Oui, February/March 1985. “The Bully,” unpublished in English, 1985. “The Invader,” unpublished in Eng
lish, 1986. “Playing and Being the Poet,” Explorations ’92, 1992.

  About the Authors

  Charles Bukowski was born in Andernach, Germany in 1920 and brought to California at age three. Although Bukowski spent two years at Los Angeles City College, he was largely self-educated as a writer. He spent much time in his youth in the Los Angeles Public Library, where he encountered some of the writers whose work would influence his own: Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, Céline, e. e. cummings, Pound, Fante, and Saroyan. He was a prolific poet and prose writer, publishing more than fifty volumes. City Lights has published several Bukowski titles including Tales of Ordinary Madness, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, and Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944–1990. Charles Bukowski died in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994.

  David Stephen Calonne is the author of William Saroyan: My Real Work Is Being, The colossus of Armenia: G.I. Gurdjieff and Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am/Interviews & Encounters 1963–1993. For City Lights, he has previously edited the Bukowski anthology Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944–1990. He has lectured in Paris and at many universities including UCLA, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of London, Harvard, and Oxford. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan. During Spring Term 2009, he taught a seminar on William Saroyan at the University of Chicago. Presently he teaches at Eastern Michigan University.

  1 . “Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip,” “Twenty Tanks from Kasseldown,” and “Hard Without Music” may be found in Charles Bukowski, Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944–1990, ed. and with an introduction by David Stephen Calonne, San Francisco: City Lights, 2008. The early stories are remarkable not only for their style and approach, but also because they encapsulate virtually all of the major themes that would preoccupy Bukowski throughout his career: his romantic and erotic quest, sense of alienation, troubled family history, discovery of alcohol, struggles to be a writer, and love of classical music.